As a preface, I used to do this a lot on Reddit. My hobby (sounds odd) was to make a little old-school-blog-style post, detailing what I found interesting in gaming in the last week or so. I got a name for it, for a time, but having long-since abandoned reddit I thought I might try the same thing here, if you’ll indulge me!

This has a focus on Steam Deck, as the damn thing is my obsession. But what is appropriate for the 'Deck might be elsewhere also, and obviously is for Linux.

…again, these are my opinions, and my own poor formatting because I’m still getting used to Lemmy. So, let’s get started?

EMULATION NEWS

• RetroDECK (a emulation suite known for its use on the Steam Deck system) has had a recent update and sub-sequent blog post which you can read in its entirety here! showing the recent video tutorial by Retro Game Corps on YouTube gave it a huge boost in user-base.

I’m personally thrilled with this, as I adore RetroDECK. I was a user of the far-more-popular EmuDeck for some time, but Retro won me over long ago, and I keep on pushing others to try!

If you’d like to see the video showing comparisons between it and EmuDeck, and a full installation guide, here is Russ’ video on YouTube

• MAME 0.275 has been released: This release adds support for several arcade games on PlayStation-based hardware, a few PowerBook Duo sub-notebook computers, some hand-held LCD games, and a couple of Casio music keyboards.

You can read the blog post on MAME Dev here!

• RSPC3’s founder “DH” has come back, and announced that they will be developing a port for Android phones. This looks to be a proper port, and not just encapsulating termux. Funny to see since the last week has seen a lot of dodgy builds from a lot of dodgy ‘developers’ for Android.

You can find the link to the GitHub page right here, if you wanna check things out

• Xbox One Emulation Well, it’s not emulation, it’s a compatibility layer much like Wine, but emulation as a term is far more recognizable than what it really is!

I’m only sharing this because it is fascinating to see what is possible, and what will be possible soon. This is just a video on YouTube by a creator by the name of MattKC Bytes. It’s a great look at what is new, what options are available and what is happening in the scene.

A link to which is right here. Again, really recommend watching this one, it’s a great video!

• Azahar (3DS) Emulator The successor to the rather popular Citra 3DS emulator has gone live now: “Starting from now, eager developers who wish to begin contributing to the project can start opening pull requests…” (and so on, it was a long statement, but you get the idea.

The GitHub page for Azahar is here

• Anbernic Not really all that relevant, but this is pretty interesting. The popular SBC retro gaming company Anbernic (SBC standing for Single Board Computer - once it was relevant to the Orange/Rasp Pi boards, but has transitioned over the years to mean primarily the Chinese retro handheld companies) has backtracked on the firmware they released for only two days which allowed users to download ROMs directly to their device. Controversial for the obvious reason, and also ironic considering the company ships thousands upon thousands of ROMs with the devices on SD cards, but that firmware has been removed now.

Obv it has been backed up elsewhere on the internet, as you can never put the genie back in the bottle! Here is a link if you want to read more/the details, but fair warning the site is pretty horrendous with pop-ups

GOG AND EPIC

What I use to play GOG (and Epic, and Amazon) games I have the tiniest Steam library, like a handful of games. The bulk of my library (thousands) is on GOG, along with the cliche of claimed Epic Games’ titles most PC gamers collect each and every week.

I use a combination of Heroic Games Launcher and Junk-Store. I use Heroic on my gaming desktop, but I also use it on my Steam Deck alongside Junk-Store.

Heroic has the benefit of a partnership between the devs and GOG itself, whereby GOG game purchases made from within Heroic will give a small % of the total to the devs, and also using their affiliate link will give them a small %. This is unique, and rather amazing.

It might be no surprise, considering GOG (in)famously announced their planned native Linux support, then abandoned doing so…leaving Heroic to fill that space.

I love their UI and themes (users customizable) and that they integrate Comet for GOG - this means that playtime and achievements are logged with your GOG account, which is an obsession of mine!

Junk-Store has the benefit of running through Decky Loader, and opening up in it’s own little world. It’s like a Steam Deck within a Steam Deck. The thing I adore most about it is how it replicates the native Steam games library on the Deck - it feels almost native.

(the developers of both Heroic and Junk-Store are personal friends of mine, so in case it matters, thought I’d mention it!)

GOG Preservation

GOG made two announcements in the last 24 hours or so, bringing more games to their lovely games Preservation Program (if you’re unaware of this program, this is a link to GOG’s site detailing exactly what it is here!

• F.E.A.R. Platinum (2005) coming to the program next month “…featuring the base game and both expansions – will be available as part of the GOG Preservation Program by next month. Originally scheduled for a later timeframe, we’ve decided to accelerate this release to properly recognize Monolith’s contributions to gaming”

And more good news was seeing 11 LEGO games titles added, including 4 new titles to GOG:

• The LEGO Movie - Videogame
• The LEGO Movie 2 - videogame
• LEGO City Undercover
• The LEGO Ninjago Video Game

…these are just the titles brand-new to GOG, you can see the full list AND the whole amazingly written blog post here with this link to their site/blog

GOG also ran a billboard in Times Square, showing Dino Crisis. It’s impossible to see who actually paid for this placement, could be either GOG or Capcom (most likely, in my opinion). I posted the billboard here on Lemmy if you’d like to see it

EPIC GAMES

Epic is always a little (lot) harder to write about. Despite their size, their reputation is always quite awful with PC gamers, and their news cycle seems to be quite barren - for the most part. Still, two things of note have happened, in quick-succession I’ll say:

• Dauntless, one of Epic’s first exclusives is shutting down on May 29th. An (ironic) post about which was shared here on Steam, if you want to see it

• Epic Games have their mobile app released. They’re giving free games away on there, one (actually two this time) each month. The app is extremely bare-bones right now, but this month if you’re interested you can grab Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic as well as the sequel for free.

I guess this is a short post, by my typical standards. There may be errors (they’re my own), there may be some odd opinions (definitely my own), and there will be formatting errors (formatting here seems not-so-easy!)

But please let me know how this goes! If you’d like to see more, then please let me know, I used to adore making these. The sad thing is at least on Reddit I’d go crazy with images for each point I found, GIF’s, etc. Here that’s not possible, but I’ve peppered it with links for those curious to follow things further!

Hope you enjoy!

<3